Product inspection is critical to any manufacturing operation. This is especially true when it comes to the manufacture of food products, and no more acutely so than with respect to products that contain dairy. While it is important for obvious health reasons to ensure that the containers holding dairy-based products are properly sealed at the factory, manufacturers recognize that an improperly sealed container can wreck havoc if that container were to spill in a production line. The production line would most likely need to be shut down temporarily while any affected machines are cleaned to remove the spilled product. At best, such a shut down results in product delays, and at worst, if a line was scheduled to run at full capacity, such a shut down means a permanent loss of revenue.
In many prior art inspection systems, product that is rejected as being defective for any reason is ejected from the conveyor system through a diverting mechanism while good product is allowed to continue along the conveyor system to the next stage. An example of which is described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,872,300, the entire contents of which is incorporated herein by reference.
The art referred to and/or described above is not intended to constitute an admission that any patent, publication or other information referred to herein is “prior art” with respect to this invention. In addition, this section should not be construed to mean that a search has been made or that no other pertinent information as defined in 37 C.F.R. §1.56(a) exists.
All U.S. patents and applications and all other published documents mentioned anywhere in this application are incorporated herein by reference in their entirety.
Without limiting the scope of the invention, a brief summary of some of the claimed embodiments of the invention is set forth below. Additional details of the summarized embodiments of the invention and/or additional embodiments of the invention may be found in the Detailed Description of the Invention below.
A brief abstract of the technical disclosure in the specification is provided for the purposes of complying with 37 C.F.R. §1.72.